The Cherry Tree

I need to sit quietly and spend some time understanding all that I have learned and experienced in the last three days as we’ve explored the Harriet Tubman Byway near Cambridge, Maryland. Words like inspiring and life-changing don’t quite do it justice.

Meanwhile, here is a poem I wrote in 2015 after a church meal at the house of friends. I had plans then to revise it, and never did. Perhaps that might be the task of the week ahead.

The Cherry Tree

After we had eaten, the adults shared stories
in a circle underneath the trees.

The children rode the tractor wagon down the hill
to splash and wander up the creek almost out of hearing
or gather sweet black raspberries to pass around in paper cups,
each set of fingers smashing down the fruit below
until all was sludge scooped out and licked from purple hands:
a sacrament.

Back from the creek and the fields and the barn they came,
dripping water, straw in their hair, trailing jewelweed,
clothes and fingers and smiles stained purple from berries.

We gathered beneath the cherry tree with buckets and bags.
We all were children then, in the kingdom of the cherry tree,
laughing, leaping high to catch her boughs
to draw the clusters down within our reach.
We could not hope to get them all,
even when the children scampered 
up into her branches.

We laughed and were amazed at the wild abundance of the tree.
And this was church as ever church can be,
all of us filled, dazzled, alit.

May your mouth be filled with sweetness.
May your ears be filled with the laughter of children.
May your heart be as wide and open as the blue sky.
And may your stories blend with the stories of others,
reaching out and upward like the branches of a tree.